Warm, tender words of sympathy came from England, from a Queen mother who well knew what sorrow meant. "Can you bear to play on the piano yet?" she asked some three months after the accident; for it was long after the death of Prince Albert before she herself could endure the sound of music. Princess Alice replied, "It seems as if I never could play again on that piano, where little hands were nearly always thrust when I wanted to play. Ernie asked, 'Why can't we all die together? I don't like to die alone, like Frittie.'"
While the heart of the Queen was aching with sympathy for her daughter, she had also to attend to arrangements for the marriage of her sailor son "Affie," now Duke of Edinburgh, with the daughter of the Emperor of Russia. She herself could not go to the wedding at St. Petersburg, but she asked Dean Stanley to go and perform the English ceremony; for as the bride was a member of the Greek Church, there was a double rite. To Dean Stanley's wife she sent a mysterious little parcel containing two sprigs of myrtle, and with it a letter which asked her to put them into warm water, and when the wedding day came, to place them in a bouquet of white flowers for the bride. The myrtle had grown from the slip in the bridal bouquet of the Princess Royal, and in the five marriages of royal children that had preceded this one, each bride had carried a bit of the bush.
When the bride reached Balmoral, a company of volunteers in kilts were waiting to receive her. Just beyond were the tenants on the Queen's estate, all in their best clothes. The pipers were present, of course, and the best clothes of the Queen's pipers were well worth seeing. The kilt was of Stuart plaid, and the tunic of black velvet. Over the shoulder was a silver chain from which hung a silver powder horn. The bag for the pipe was of blue velvet. Ornaments were worn wherever there was a place for them, but the only jewels were cairngorms, and they were always set in silver. The shoes had heavy silver buckles. The bride and all her royal friends drove to the castle, where their health was drunk by a merry company. The end of the Queen's account of this reception of royalty sounds delightfully simple and homelike. "We took Marie and Alfred to their rooms downstairs," she says, "and sat with them while they had their tea."